An anonymous poll of five players from each of the NLL’s 14 teams found unanimous agreement that fighting still serves a purpose in the league. Ninety-three percent of respondents said viral fight videos help promote the NLL, 0 percent said they hurt and 7 percent said they neither help nor hurt. Many players said fights boost awareness and excitement for the sport.

Responses were split on whether fighting deters American collegiate players from pursuing the NLL: 4 percent said “yes, a lot,” 22 percent said “yes, some,” 37 percent said “no,” and 37 percent said “who cares.” Seventy-eight percent of respondents said they had not thought less of a teammate for not fighting, 22 percent said they had, and none of the poll respondents expected fighting to be banned soon. Twenty-six percent said fighting might eventually be banned and 74 percent said it never would be.

Lax Mag published the survey results alongside its All-Time and Current Fight Club rankings and maintains the Fight Club coverage series and the NLL Fight Club Player Poll. Lax Mag’s current and all-time top-10 fighter lists rely on contemporary statistics and historical comparison and are framed within broader debates about game identity, fan engagement, and officiating. The magazine noted a modern decline in fighting driven in part by teams emphasizing face-off specialists over enforcers and by protracted officiating reviews, and it recalled that during the OG LaxMag era Fight Club pieces and players such as Tim O’Brien and Geoff Snider drove outsized traffic.

League attendance figures show strains: six of the nine lowest average home attendances have come since 2020, and the current NLL regular season is averaging under 8,000 tickets per game, a figure buoyed significantly by Buffalo’s Banditland. Taken together, the poll and the rankings highlight a tension between persistent player endorsement of fighting as culturally and commercially valuable and league-level trends that have reduced on-field fighting.